Urban Video Project (UVP) and parent organization Light Work are pleased to announce “We Were Never Human,” a year-long program at UVP and partner organizations that will feature the work of established and emerging artists who explore the shifting idea of what it means to human, the notion of posthumanism and encounters with the non-human.

Posthumanism has become an umbrella term under which a diverse array of contemporary intellectual currents across all disciplines in the humanities can be grouped. While the term is not unproblematic, it does capture the sense that both a radical rethinking of the humanities/humanism, and a rapprochement between the humanities and the sciences, are an urgent necessity in order to address the most pressing issues that we as a species currently face. Part of this urgency comes from the pressure placed on the very notion of the human by our rapidly changing understanding of ourselves in light of developments in neuroscience and genetics, human-caused climate change, the increasingly sophisticated and insidious forms assumed by biopolitical power, capital’s increasingly neoliberal turn, and exponential advances in computational and communications technologies, to name but a few examples. At the same time, posthumanism entails a decentering of the human subject that opens up critically important questions about how to reconstruct ethics without the notion of an implicitly human “worthy subject” at its center.

UVP’s 2015-2016 program “We Were Never Human” features the work of contemporary artists exploring these complex themes through their content, form, and practice.